Thoughts on the state of science nowadays?

[HappySkeptic]

That’s been the state of science for nearly a century (the phrase ‘publish or perish’ dates from the late 1920s).

I’m surprised that you seem surprised by this.

Boru

And what shall we do about it?

Lately I’ve been thinking I don’t want to be a researcher/professor anymore.

I think nowadays the only way you can find creative freedom is art. Since you absolute control over your work (literature, painting, etc).

There is a satisfaction to publishing a good paper.

Your ability to write a good paper depends on whether you have access to sufficient equipment, and enough collaborations to get good work done.  In experimental fields, one often needs help from people who run $million+ equipment.  For them to help you, they need to believe that you can publish something of value.  In theoretical fields, one often needs collaborators to put the pieces together.

There are a lot of hassles with the academic world.  There is the constant writing of research proposals, the fight to get tenure, working with grad students, teaching, and then finding time to do research.

And yet, some people love the sense of discovery, and the peer recognition, enough to deal with it all.

[Mister Agenda]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Open_Science

[LinuxGal]

I have heard it said that no matter how bad a scientific paper is that there is a journal somewhere that will publish it.  It seems to me that a better metric would be not the number of publications that a scientist makes, but the citations of those papers by other scientists.  I once had my undergraduate advisor tell me that nearly all masters theses were garbage, and after getting over my initial shock and subsequent inquiry, he went on to tell me that they were garbage because no one read them.

[Jehanne]

Is he transgender? Doesn't look that way in his current photos.

P S. He is also a practicing Catholic.

[LinuxGal]

Is he transgender?  Doesn't look that way in his current photos.

P S.  He is also a practicing Catholic.

I'm glad you posted this because I wasn't sure third-party images worked on this forum. 

I'm not glad you posted this because jokes that need to be explained aren't funny. 

;-)

[Belacqua]

Publish or perish. Nowadays to publish papers, if possible on prestigious magazines, is what every scientist must strive to. No longer you do science and see what happens. Rather, finding positive results and publishing is what matters today.

Publishers making billions out of the work of scientists who earn nothing back (Elsevier, etc). The career of scientists depending on quantity and quality of papers. Which must be done within a certain time and budget limit. Most of the time research has been already predefined by the laboratory or professor.

This is what I heard during my sojourn through academia. Publish or perish, and the need to get grant money -- usually from the government or for-profit corporations -- pretty much determined what research would be done. And to a large extent meant that the results were pre-determined. Some good things may be discovered, but it's a hell of a long way from pure science. 

I also knew some people in the Linguistics department who had similar troubles. Since this isn't STEM you might think it would be less strict, but it's still largely based on data-gathering and interpretation. Department politics determined exactly what the students were allowed to research and whose data they were allowed to write about. Basically they ended up doing the department head's writing for her, and ended up with the ground-breaking conclusion that beginning language learners make a lot of mistakes, while more advanced students make fewer. And they paid a ton of tuition money to have the privilege of writing it up.

My own department was the farthest away from STEM -- philosophy of art and aesthetics. But it was also guided entirely by institutional needs. In that department I never once had a conversation with a peer or a professor about art. It was all about which conference you were going to, how many people attended your presentation, what journal you'd published in. Everybody was publishing somewhere, but nobody had the time or the interest to read it. Even if someone had managed to publish great things, they would have been lost in the general flood of paper. 

I guess some people still manage to navigate the system and end up publishing good stuff. More power to them. They are the exceptions. 

But in STEM once you're out of academia I don't see how things could improve. If you want a living wage you pretty much have to sell your soul to a corporation or the Pentagon. 

We still hear people say "trust the science" and "I trust it because it's peer reviewed," but people with this kind of confidence seem unaware of the political, ideological, and financial influences that are deep into science as we know it.

[LinuxGal]

I have heard it said that no matter how bad a scientific paper is that there is a journal somewhere that will publish it.  It seems to me that a better metric would be not the number of publications that a scientist makes, but the citations of those papers by other scientists.  I once had my undergraduate advisor tell me that nearly all masters theses were garbage, and after getting over my initial shock and subsequent inquiry, he went on to tell me that they were garbage because no one read them.

The Niels Bohr clique told Hugh Everett III his doctoral thesis ("The Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics") was garbage too, simply because he didn't add assumptions like a cut between the quantum world and the classical world. He said fuck it, quit academia, went to the Pentagon, and died a millionaire. Nowadays Many Worlds is the hottest shit on the dance floor.

[HappySkeptic]

The Niels Bohr clique told Hugh Everett III his doctoral thesis ("The Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics") was garbage too, simply because he didn't add assumptions like a cut between the quantum world and the classical world. He said fuck it, quit academia, went to the Pentagon, and died a millionaire. Nowadays Many Worlds is the hottest shit on the dance floor.

Yes, Many Worlds is the hottest thing now.  Sean Carroll claims that it is "simply right".  I think it is the same stuff in a different package, and doesn't actually solve the measurement problem.

[Goosebump]

Just did an experiment to see if the earth has gravity. I held up a weight and predicted it would fall down upon my toe. I dropped the weight and it fell upon my toe. The scientific method is sound.

Science doesn't need you, me or anybody to publish or not. It's going to keep on going on regardless. The better question is, do you want a career in academia?

Equating your career to the "future of science" is a little grandiose wouldn't you say?

[arewethereyet]

Thread closed